Hi!
I’m Geoff Rodkey.
I write books
and MOVIEs.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Scroll down for a list of career highlights, in reverse chronological order.
author photo © Ash Fox LLC
2024: Bad Advice
As of about five minutes ago, I’ve decided to become an advice columnist. All of my advice is free! It’s also terrible. Click here to read the column, and drop a line if you have any questions for which you’d like a thoughtful, empathetic, totally wrong answer.
2021:
LIGHTS OUT IN LINCOLNWOOD
My first novel for adults is a dark comedy about a privileged family’s attempts to cope with a sudden technological apocalypse in the New Jersey suburbs.
Publishers Weekly calls it “an irresistible story.”
The Barnes & Noble newsletter calls it “sharp, addictive, wryly funny…[and] wholly original.”
2021-22:
MARCUS MAKES A MOVIE / marcus makes it big
Kevin Hart wrote these books! (I helped.) Book 1 is a funny, inspirational, occasionally even heartwarming story about a kid who makes a superhero movie with his friends despite having no experience, no budget, and no idea what he’s doing.
Kirkus says it’s “a charming read that demystifies the work of making a movie and celebrates the gifts of authentic friendship.”
In book 2, MARCUS MAKES IT BIG, the movie goes viral...and Marcus learns the hard way that instant attention isn’t all upside. Kirkus calls it “a delightfully funny read that accurately deals with the challenges of internet fame and nurturing friendships.”
2019:
WE’RE NOT FROM HERE
A sci-fi comedy for middle grade readers about a family of humans who immigrate to an alien planet after Earth is destroyed.
In 2020, Columbia Pictures hired me to write a film adaptation. (Fun! Exciting! Will not necessarily result in an actual film. Movie studios commission a lot of scripts that never become movies. See below, under “1997-2002.”)
2018:
STUCK IN THE STONE AGE
A middle grade sci-fi comedy that’s also a how-to guide for aspiring young writers, written in collaboration with the Story Pirates from an idea by then-11-year-old Story Pirates fan Vince Boberski.
2015-2017:
THE TAPPER TWINS
A four-book illustrated middle grade comedy series. The first installment, THE TAPPER TWINS GO TO WAR (WITH EACH OTHER), was a New York Times bestseller.
2012-2014:
THE CHRONICLES OF EGG
A middle grade comedy-adventure trilogy, set in a pirate-infested tropical island chain.
The first book, DEADWEATHER AND SUNRISE, was a finalist for the Waterstones Childrens Book Prize in the U.K. and appeared on multiple 2012 Best Books of the Year lists.
I am very proud of this series despite its having a terribly ill-advised title, which was entirely my fault. I thought there was something clever about pairing a classy-looking word like “Chronicles” with a stupid-looking word like “Egg.”
I was wrong about that. But these are really fun books! And I continue to hope that someday, I’ll persuade Penguin to re-release the series as The Deadweather Chronicles and book 1 as Deadweather Island.
2011:
GOOD LUCK CHARLIE: IT’S CHRISTMAS
This movie-length holiday episode of the popular Disney Channel sitcom was the top-rated live action TV movie of 2011.
2007:
DADDY DAY CAMP
The sequel to a popular 2003 film (see below).
I wrote the first draft of this screenplay in early 2003. After two other writing teams rewrote it, only a few isolated lines from my original script remained in the 2006 shooting draft.
The resulting movie was so wildly successful that it was 12 years before a movie studio hired me to work on another feature film (see above, under “2019”).
2006:
RV
I wrote the first several drafts of RV, which was then rewritten by another writing team.
It was the #1 film at the U.S. box office on its first weekend of release.
Which was kind of cool.
But fifteen years later, I still get sad and frustrated when I think about the ways the script changed after I got replaced. Even in success, the film business can be heartbreaking.
2006:
The shaggy dog
I wrote the last several drafts of this script, which had previously been written, re-written, and re-re-written by something like eight other writers.
You wouldn’t think it’d take that many people to come up with a script about a guy who turns into a dog. Especially when it’s a remake. But it did.
2003:
DADDY DAY CARE
This was the fourteenth screenplay I wrote, and the first one to be made into a movie.
I wrote the first six drafts (more? less? - it was a long time ago), which were then rewritten by another writing team, after which I wrote a few more drafts.
It debuted at #2 at the box office and earned over a hundred million dollars domestically, despite being pronounced “a woeful miscalculation, a film so wrong-headed that audiences are more likely to be appalled than amused” by Roger Ebert, America’s preeminent film critic.
Roger Ebert died of tongue cancer in 2013.
1997-2002:
lotS AND LOTS of unproduced screenplays
In 1997, I sold my first screenplay to Universal Pictures.
Dave the Ox was a satire about a small-town high school football team in Texas. I used to pitch the story as “Apocalypse Now meets Hoosiers,” which is probably why it’s never been produced.
After I sold Dave the Ox, I spent six years writing and selling (or, just as often, NOT selling) a dozen still-unproduced screenplays to various Hollywood studios, while being unable to convince people I met at cocktail parties that I was actually a working screenwriter even though nothing I’d written had ever been made into a movie.
1995-97:
The Al Franken Years
In 1995, Al Franken hired me to help him research RUSH LIMBAUGH IS A BIG FAT IDIOT (AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS). He also wrote me into the book as a semi-fictional character, “Geoff the research assistant” — and in one chapter, as part of a larger point Al was making about the inequities in the U.S. health care system, my character dies of an easily treatable disease because Al isn’t required to provide his employees with health insurance.
Not every reader got the joke, and a handful of them were upset enough to write letters to Al condemning him for allowing me to die. I wound up writing postcards to all of these people that began, “Dear ____: Al Franken has requested that I write to inform you I am not dead.”
The book spent 7 weeks in the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list, and I spent the next two years helping Al with whatever he was doing. I learned a lot from him about comedy writing and public service — and I somehow got an Emmy nomination out of it, for helping write his segments with Arianna Huffington that aired on Comedy Central’s Politically Incorrect during the 1996 political conventions.
1995:
NEWTISMS
My first book! Sort of.
A compilation of the most provocative, absurd, and/or mendacious public utterances of then-newly elected Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, this was a $4.99 paperback, compiled on a ridiculously short deadline.
I’m pretty sure I got this job because I was the only person Pocket Books could find on zero notice who was willing to spend Christmas Week of 1994 in a D.C. research library, rifling through old copies of The Congressional Record. Hoping to capitalize on the publicity around Gingrich’s ascension to the speakership, Pocket printed (if I remember correctly) 500,000 copies, of which 470,000 were returned unsold. Partly, this was because two other publishers put out quickie books of Newt Gingrich quotations at the same time. But mostly, I think it was because people just don’t like Newt Gingrich.
1994:
The “Cow Tipping” and “Health Club” EPISODES of MTV’s Beavis and Butt-Head
My first professional writing credits, co-written with future Simpsons producer J. Stewart Burns.
These two four-minute cartoons are still the high-water mark of my pop-cultural cachet. Early ‘90’s me would’ve been disappointed to learn that I’d never be even close to this cool again.
1992:
The dartmouth review parody
During my senior year of college, I edited and co-wrote the Harvard Lampoon parody of ultra-right-wing college newspaper The Dartmouth Review. A road trip to New Hampshire to distribute the parody led to my being banned from Dartmouth College’s campus along with five other Lampoon staffers.
After an article about the incident in The New York Times made Dartmouth look like they couldn’t take a joke, the ban was quietly rescinded.
Some Hitler jokes are funnier than others.
I still think this one’s funny.
1985-1988: THE PRETZ NEWS
I grew up in Freeport, Illinois, and in high school, I wrote humor pieces for our school newspaper.
(It’s called The Pretz News because our school mascot was a pretzel. Weird, right? The weirdest thing about it was that we didn’t think it was weird. It was all we knew.)
In all seriousness, these were the most creatively satisfying years of my life. I wrote pretty much whatever I wanted, I had a regular audience, and I could instantly tell if my pieces were any good — because when they were, kids would come up to me in the hallway and tell me I’d just made them laugh; and when they weren’t, the same kids would tell me I sucked.
Thirty-five years later, that kind of honest feedback from an engaged audience about a piece of writing I created is still the biggest reason I get up in the morning and try to do this job.